One way or another, it would have to be added to his regular patrol. An unguarded gate was dangerous.
“Where do you lead, I wonder?” the cat mused, sniffing each of the circling stones in turn. Then he hissed and drew back sharply, his nose filled with the aroma of caorann berries. They littered the ground around the Faerie Circle, dozens of them squashed and stamped flat among the stones so that the moss was stained with their juices. No caorann trees grew in this vicinity that the cat could recall. Which meant someone had carried the berries here.
Caorann trees were known for one chief quality: their ability to unravel enchantments.
The perfume of the berries was very light, but once it entered the nostrils, it didn’t easily let go. The cat sat for a while, grooming his face as though he could somehow push the smell out of his nose with one white paw. As he groomed, he thought.
Someone had been working enchantments here. Someone whose smell was now hidden by the caorann. Everyone knew that Knights of the Farthest Shore patrolled this particular stretch of the Wood, and someone wanted to disguise nefarious doings.
The cat finished grooming and sat quite still, his paws placed delicately before him, his plume of a tail sweeping gently back and forth. His eyes were mostly closed so that one might assume he dozed, but the thin membrane of his third eyelid remained open as he studied the setting from behind long, cattish lashes.
He came to a sudden decision and stood. Trotting back to his regular Path, he hurried on to the closest gate. This appeared to mortal eyes like a pair of young trees with unusually large and twisted roots twining together in vegetal affection.
With a slight shiver of his whiskers, the cat stepped between these two trees and into another world.
It was colder than he expected. And he stood in icy water.
“Dragon’s teeth!” snarled the cat and leapt back, scrambling up from the river’s edge into the brush lining the bank beyond. It had been some time since last he’d passed into this corner of the Near World. The river had been low in its bed then. Now it was swollen, the warmth of summer bringing rushing thaw down from the mountains.
The cat climbed into the shelter of a grove of aspen trees and gazed out across the river, catching his bearings. He recognized the stern face of Gaheris Castle above the tall cliff across the river. A likely enough focus for secret Faerie plots. But from this vantage, the cat could see no sign of a gate opening. He’d have to venture deeper.
Picking his way downriver, following its flow, the cat reached a place where large boulders offered a crossing. To most looking on, there would seem little point in taking this daring bridge, for the stone cliff on which Gaheris stood rose sheer and forbidding on the opposite shore.
But the cat had been this way once or twice, and he knew more than a few secrets. He sprang from boulder to boulder, surefooted even as the fur on his spine stood up like a crest for dread of the rushing water beneath him.
On the far side, nearly hidden behind a stone, was a cave entrance.
The cat slipped inside easily enough; his golden eyes flared with their own bright light, like two small suns in the damp darkness. Water from the river ran into the cave, not deep but still freezing. A convenient ledge provided the cat with a dry route for the first stretch of this journey, however, and only near the end was he obliged to spring down into the water.
A stone stairway rose into the darkness, cut from the cliff itself. Up this the cat ran, higher and higher until he left the cold of underground behind and entered the cold of man-laid stone. His sensitive nose caught the many smells of mortals going about their daily lives within the castle, unaware of his presence within the secret passage behind the walls.
It always surprised him how strongly mortals smelled of oncoming death. How strange it must be to live governed by so short a span of existence! But this stink of death was stronger than expected, and a suspicion began to form in the cat’s mind.
He came at last to the top of the stair and faced a heavy, locked door. Not an iron lock, thank the Lights Above! He could not manipulate iron. But brass would bow to his will.
The cat took a different form and worked on the lock such influence as Faeries have. He heard the catch give way and carefully pushed the door aside.
The smell of near death nearly overwhelmed him.
A fire burned in the darkened room, casting all in reddish glow, for little daylight found its way through the east windows this late in the day. On the wall hung a heavy tapestry depicting a scene from the Legend of the Brothers Ashiun, complete with the House of Lights and the swirling fires of the dragon, though the dragon itself had been omitted. Equally heavy curtains embellished with flowers and vines and fantastical creatures surrounded an enormous, four-poster bed.